The Guardian FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1935. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LVI, Issue 41, 24 May 1935, Page 4

The Guardian

FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1935. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Printed at Leeston, Canterbury, New Zealand, on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. ■

Under the name of Aircraftsman T. E. Shaw was disguised one of the most outstanding personalities of the British leaders in the War, Thomas Edward Lawrence of Arabia,- whose death occurred a few days ago as the result of a motor ear accident. It was only after the War that the public began to learn of the romantic exploits of this young man, this unknown Oxford graduate who had united the disunited nomadic tribes of Arabia and had conducted a successful campaign against the Turks; who had achieved what Arabian statesmen and rulers.had endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to do for hundreds of years. Before the War he had wandered in the deserts of the East for seven years, and could speak the language like a native. He knew; the Arab, had steeped himself in the traditions of the country, was bold and enterprising and possessed all those attributes of leadership which appealed most to the wild tribesmen out of whom he was to create an army, not disciplined as were i the armies of Europe, but one ' whieh, suited to the conditions of ! warfare in the desert, was to deal !a series of irritating and disastrous blows to its ancient enemies the' Turks and to prove a material factor in the collapse of that nation and its retirement from the war. He was again the centre of publicity when his account of the Arab revolt, a manuscript of 400,000 words (about five times the length of an ordinary novel) was stolen, together with his notes and numerous photographs, which he had left unguarded for a few minutes in a handbag at the railway station at Reading (England). Lawrence's subsequent book, " Revolt in the Desert," is a much abridg'ed edition of the stolen manuscript. I Lawrence sat down with an heroic effort of memory to rewrite the account. He never intended it, however, for publication. He had it printed on a j newspaper press in Oxford, in an edition limited characteristically to eight copies, of which three, in what seems an excess of reticence, were afterwards destroyed. \

After attending the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919 as a member of the British delegation, where he was greatly disappointed on finding that the promises made to the Arabs were not to. be fulfilled in their entirety, he sought retirement from the public eye by enlisting in the British Army as a private under an assumed name. Mr Robert Graves, who has been an intimate friend of Lawrence, wrote as follows in his book, "Lawrence and the Arabs": "In August, 1922, Lawrence, having finally renounced the use of that name, .enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He did all the usual duties of a man in the lowest grade of the force, and steadfastly refused promotion. For six months he raised no suspicion at all about his identity. He got on well with the men, though he was very raw and clumsy at the new life. Unfortunately, an officer recognised him, and sold the information for £30 to a daily paper, with the result that there was an unwelcome publicity stunt made of it, and the suspicion then arose among the men that Lawrence was an Air Force spy! The Secretary of State for Air feared that questions might be asked in the House of Commons as to what he was doing there under an assumed name, so he ."judged it necessary to dismiss him in February, 1923." A month later he reenlisted in the Royal Tank Corps, and, after over two years, returned to the Air Force.